


this cold harbor, now home

by khlassique



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, lesbihonest, post-tros haze thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:27:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25697269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khlassique/pseuds/khlassique
Summary: Rey Skywalker believes the Jedi will only survive if their- her- theology is first studied and tested along the cracks. That was her life for so long: taking things apart, fixing them, figuring out what had most value.
Relationships: Rey/Rose Tico
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	this cold harbor, now home

**Author's Note:**

> a short lil post canon fic that i originally wrote after watching tros in theatres! reyrose hive WILL be made canon one day 
> 
> title from the decemberists song "sons & daughters"

The ancient Jedi texts say that to love is to eventually travel into fear and therefore the dark side. Rose says,  _ this is how we win, by loving _ , so that is what Rey does. She loves. She loves so deeply it transcends grace, transcends the Force, until her padawans learn that to love is their strength. It is not enough to live if you cannot love, she tells them, and if you love deeply and broadly, if you love the sensation of breath in your lungs, the dark will never take you. 

Luke Skywalker believed he could do tradition better than the Order of old Ben Kenobi. More compassion, more strict adherence would hold together an innately broken thing.

Rey Skywalker believes the Jedi will only survive if their-  _ her _ \- theology is first studied and tested along the cracks. That was her life for so long: taking things apart, fixing them, figuring out what had most value. The old ways of the Jedi fall apart under her touch, rebuilt in the image of love. Love of your path. Love of your family. Love of your galaxy.

The new students, and every class after, are never permanently severed from their family.

Luke’s ghost tries to discuss this deviation from the most basic of the old ways with her. She ignores him up to a point; the fight starts with her snarling at him that he wouldn’t know, would he, what it was to grow up without love or family. So well suited, she and her master. Both stubborn as haggling jawa. 

Anakin appears as Rey and Luke shout at each other across a training room, Rey slamming gear back into drawers and onto hooks while Luke paces and gestures. Anakin, who failed in his work and lives with the consequences even beyond the touch of mortal death, lays a not-quite-solid hand on his son’s shoulder and tells them both to quiet down. Luke and Rey glare at Anakin with uncannily similar disdain at being interrupted by someone they both know to have scores of his own emotion boiling below the surface, but the shouting ends, to the rest of the temple’s relief. 

_ Luke. Remember cradling the weight of my body?  _ Those words turn Luke Skywalker into a man Rey never knew in life; his face turns from her, his hand gently covering his father’s as he sighs. Grief flows through the Force, solid as a fist to the ribs. Later, Rose says,  _ he is afraid for you, as Leia was, as I am. We love you, and for that we will carry fear close. Yours is a hard burden we can only partly shoulder.  _

That was the first time Rose had said what between them was love. 

The children thrive under Master Rey's tutelage, regardless of any grumbling from the other side of the Force from Luke trying to manage things. Finn helps first as her apprentice and then as a fellow Jedi, his saber strapped to his side as his hands gently guide students in their tasks. When there is crying in the night, it is Master Finn Dameron they call for, knowing he will hug them tight and kiss their heads and maybe, if Master Finn is feeling generous, they will both go to the kitchens for sweet-sand cookies. If the upset child is  _ very  _ lucky,  _ Mr _ . Dameron will be there too, and he always has the best and funniest stories, even when he and Master Finn tease each other about how many cookies Mr. Dameron eats. Every year, he runs a stunt flying course for the advanced padawans, one of many guest instructors brought in from across the galaxy. Master Skywalker’s students are not bound only to their study of the Force, and for that, they flourish. 

At night, when the students are abed, Rey goes to her quarters, where she falls into Rose’s steady arms and breathes into the crook of her wife’s neck and feels the great arc of the galaxy snapping into place no matter how the day has gone. Once upon a time, she had been scraping together a living, but not a life, on a sandy desert planet, and then a droid and a boy had crashed into it and taken her away and she first saw  _ green _ , so much green she’d have drowned in it. She had traversed the stars to seek her fate and found a family, built on the foundation of her scrabbling trust, and found her brothers and her wife– her wonderful, headstrong wife who had turned her keen mind and sense of justice to the law. 

Rose Tico’s name appears on litigation across the galaxy, her soldier’s doggedness making her the scourge of those who’d illegally profited off of war business. Or perhaps it had once been legal to profit off the deaths of those less fortunate, and Rose  _ perhaps _ found ways to punish those responsible in and outside of the courts. 

Perhaps. A lawyer would know all the evidence presented would only be circumstantial, and never properly admitted onto the record. 

Rose lounges on their couch as satisfied as a hunting cat, still in her court suit, speaking in hypotheticals while Rey smooths black hair out of its braided crown:  _ if _ Canto Bright had been dismantled and  _ if _ the caretakers had been set free and  _ if _ those same caretakers had been given the planet’s rotten spoils with aid of smuggled weapons. So be it. Canto Bright had not followed the new laws, and justice had been done.

Leia says, sounding both far away and in Rey’s ear:  _ a vicious one, this daughter-in-law of mine. On my mother’s planet, she would have been a Queen beloved _ . One side of Rey’s mouth pulls up before she slides her hands alongside Rose’s face, underneath her chin, tilting her mouth up to be softly kissed, a silent  _ I love you _ . Leia’s presence leaves them like smoke in a breeze. 

Rey had refused to be accompanied to the old Lars farm all that time ago, but Rose had gently wiped the sand off her face afterwards, one of many moments where the hard edges of Rey’s skepticism had begun to soften. They learned together how to live in peace-time, after years of war-fury, war-tension. There was no threat after war as large as the First Order, no reason to sleep with the tensed muscles of a soldier. To sleep untroubled was a learned skill for them both, made easier once they began to share a bed. 

Finn had nodded as Rey explained the difference, saying,  _ yes, I’ve only truly  _ slept _ in Poe’s bed _ . Neither had been looking at the other, instead leaning over the temple balustrade in a wash of sunset that turned everything gold, even the silver ring on Finn’s left hand. He was the first person she had ever loved, with every bitter sinew of her heart. She still loved him, would love him forever, he who had carried her signal home across the stars. When he had left after the end of the war, to go with Poe to gather the Stormtroopers left adrift and guide them to a better future within the Republic, she had slipped a tracker around her neck, crafted by Rose as a gift. There were three lights on it, for Finn and Rose and Poe. Never again would her family be lost to her. 

A few days after the conversation with Finn, Rey had taken Rose close in the middle of a blooming meadow, clasped their hands tightly between them and asked,  _ I love you terribly, starlight. Marry me? _ There, amongst the flowers and buzzing insects, far away from the temple, she had shed the authority of being Master Skywalker, upon who so many depended. There, she was simply Rey, trembling, fighting the urge to stare down at their intertwined fingers. 

Rose had replied to the proposal by laughing and leaping forward, her sudden embrace tumbling them both into a bed of crushed tall sweet grasses and flowers. The hot sun had made everything in their temporary bower smell of green and sweat as they kissed, and still Rey trembled, though then because of her unguarded joy, so bright even the Force itself trembled alongside.


End file.
